Covered

I read something the other day that made me wonder at how simple God created us. Or perhaps instead of simple, He made us innocent. He made us to wonder. To ask questions. To be unafraid of purity - pouring out our hearts. We handed that in at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Can you imagine the sick, sick feeling Adam and Eve must have had when they realized that being like God wasn't at all as wonderful as He was? I've been picturing Eve, innocent, blown away by His wonderful, wonderful glory and joy and beauty and Godness, longing to be as beautiful as He was, accepting the serpent's invitation to "be like God, knowing good and evil."

Oh sorrow. Eve has been pining to own His beauty since, longing at least for her lost innocence, covering herself, uncovering herself, trying always to escape the shame of her nakedness, knowing deep within how she can never be as beautiful as He was. I know. I am Eve. Deep in my spirit, a spirit created in the image of God, I know what the whole wretched world knows - that I was meant to be innocent, meant to walk with Him in the Garden, meant to be naked, poured out before Him. I was meant to know Him.

I am told to seek His face. His face?

The most beautiful scene in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movie Trilogy is Aragorn's final encounter with Arwen, the love he'd believed was lost to him forever. As she approaches, arrayed in light and beauty and the hope she never lost in the darkness, she looks down, not meeting the eyes of the one for whom she gave her life. The look in Aragorn's eyes is heart-breaking. Amazed, completed. Shocked that she would look down before him with any shame. He reaches for her chin and raises her eyes to his. I hear in my heart the aching, passionate words he does not say - "no, never with me. never look down with me -" and then she is in his arms.

And we, His ekklesia, the bride of the Man who is our Savior, look away from His face in shame as we approach Him, because we cannot approach without laying down our own lives. Because we are nothing. Because we know we are nothing. Revealed. Uncovered. Naked.

Yet when the layers are stripped away, when I am uncovered, I find intimacy. I am invited to look into His eyes, to reach out to trace the lines of love and pain and joy and sorrow and life and... death in His face. Death that He died to clothe me in the beauty of Himself. The beauty I, Eve, wanted when I ate of the fruit to be like Him.

The disillusionment fades away with the longing for what was as He awakens in me beauty I thought I could find without Him, beauty that is like Him, that is Him in me - and I am His bride.

I spend my days right now seeking. I seek time, words, space, photos, love, food, hope, affirmation. The list is endless. And I don't always seek His face. I want to bring Him to what I'm doing, I think. To how I'm making me beautiful. I want to tack Him on because I think He should be a part of what I look like. But when I do see His face, there is only Him, and I wonder. There are no prayers left about me but that I can enter into Him.

My prayers are different than they have been. I ask God who He is. What He is doing. Why this and that happen. What I'm going to do with Piper. Who this person is. What He does with pain. He doesn't answer all of my peppering questions. But I know He doesn't mind them. He knows the answers I need now. I can let Satan have his shame and his knowledge of good and evil. I think it is enough to trust God to reveal Himself to me in His own time. It is enough for now to wonder, to hope, to look up into His face and find that being naked with Him doesn't mean shame.

I am covered in His love.